• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1212 0

there by some benign force for man’s pleasure and well-being. All three beliefs are toxic delusions. I have spent weeks combing the scientific journals for data on the poisons that lurk in every bowl of salad and every basket of crudités. My quarry was not the artificial man-made pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, and hormones that hog the headlines of our daily newspapers. I was after the true perils—the fresh and natural poisons that plants manufacture to stay alive and perpetuate their species, just as a cobra uses its venom. Having completed my research, I can confidently predict that by the end of this century the surgeon general of the United States will require the following warning label on every spear of broccoli and every leaf of spinach: “Excess Consumption of Salad Ingredients Can Cause Vitamin Deficiency, Bad Skin, Lathyrism, Anemia, and, Quite Frankly, Death.”

Imagine that you are a juicy and attractive vegetable. All around you are predators—germs and fungi, bugs and snails, birds and animals—who see you as nothing more than their next meal. You have no house to hide in, no feet for running away, no money with which to buy a gun. It’s a real jungle out there, and even the neighboring vegetables covet your place in the sun. What do you do? You pull yourself together and evolve a complex system of chemical warfare.

Like the walnut and eucalyptus trees, you can secrete a growth inhibitor through your leaves that the rain will wash down into the soil to keep your neighbors at a safe distance, or you can secrete it directly through your roots as apple trees and wheat do. If you lack subtlety, imitate poison ivy and produce an oil so noxious that human predators will teach their children to avoid you like the plague. If you approve of contraception, concoct a brew of juvabiones to delay the reproduction of insects that bite you, or ecdysones to accelerate their growth right past the childbearing years. If you excel in Byzantine plots as the snake-root does, you might consider tainting the milk of cows that forage on you so that Abraham Lincoln’s mother will die when she drinks it. Think of the publicity.

So much for the benignity of the plant kingdom. Generally speaking, there are four categories of chemical weaponry that salad deploys against its human predators: nutrition blockers, toxins, mutagens (which alter genetic material), and carcinogens.

Nutrition blockers are the most delicious of the four, morally delicious, that is, because they rob salad gluttons of the one excuse for their obsessive behavior—the belief that salad is good for you. Nutrition blockers are chemicals that bind with some desirable vitamin or mineral and prevent your intestines from absorbing it. My favorite is the oxalic acid in raw spinach, a vegetable exalted for its high content of calcium and iron. Oxalic acid, it seems, forms an insoluble complex with calcium and iron—not only the calcium and iron in the spinach itself but other sources of them as well—and renders uncooked spinach a non-nutritious green. Lots of oxalates are also found in raw beet greens, Swiss chard, and rhubarb. (But rest assured that the recorded cases of death following the eating of raw rhubarb were probably due to toxic anthraquinone glycosides.)

Raw red cabbage, brussels sprouts, and beets contain an antivitamin that binds with the B vitamin thiamine and stops its absorption. Similar antithiamine substances are also found in mustard seeds, some berries, cottonseed (the oil of which finds its way into the cheaper salad dressings), and some ferns (fiddlehead fans take note). The raw egg in a Caesar salad contains avidin, which binds up the B vitamin called biotin in much the same way. Magnesium, zinc, and copper get the same binding treatment from phytates in uncooked grain protein, which includes the wheat germ that some folks sprinkle on their salads. Raw soybeans contain antagonists to vitamin B12 and vitamin D and can cause rickets. And a vitamin E blocker in raw kidney beans, alfalfa, and some peas increases the incidence of liver disease in animals.